It's nice to see another mainstream newspaper publish an article about mp3 music and poor sound quality. Although Joel Selvin briefly confuses two kinds of compressions (volume versus data), his article thoroughly reveals the musical data loss resulting from mp3 lossy compression.
His article also mentions the FLAC format, but it mentions that "several major technological hurdles will have to be cleared" to improve digital audio. This is not the case - the hurdles are business-model related, not technical. Perhaps he'll write a future article about the artificial format restrictions created by Apple, Microsoft, and the record industry in general.
That all said, bravo to the Chron for the article.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/08/08/DDEJR7KN11.DTL
